Hobby Projects
Builds
In 2023 I decided to build a record-player inspired lighting feature for my brother in-law to use in his vinyl listening room. The project is built using individually addressable LED "neon" strips, an ESP-32 microcontroller, and WLED to run the effects. Lighting effects are programmable via a wifi-app. The newest and most challenging aspect of this build was working with polycarbonate.
Homelab
From the first day when I connected the family computer to my own 486 machine with a couple of 3com ISA NICs and a really long “phone cord,” I have maintained some kind of “homelab.” By high-school, I was running numerous services in my windows 2000 server which I purchased used for $50 from a co-worker (a dual slot 1 Pentium II server). Today I run a more production-oriented environment to support my freelance work mostly consisting of a NAS, a VM host, and enterprise switches and firewalls. I also tend to avoid reliance on cloud services, so I have maintained a dedicated family-NAS, accessible from anywhere, to house the ever-growing collection of vacation pics and digitized memorabilia. I currently keep things simple and run most things in TrueNAS, vanilla Ubuntu Server, and containers. I have previously used ESXi and Proxmox as well as playing around with BeHyve in FreeBSD. I was a long-time user of Nextcloud, but maintenance and security became too much of a headache and I abandoned it in favor of a simpler and more secure VPN setup. Ultimately, I enjoy working with the hardware more than I do the software. I love finding great deals on decommissioned enterprise hardware and extending its life with some tweaks and hacks.
Analog Media Digitization and Restoration
During the pandemic I started converting old family tapes to digital formats for a friend. I had previously acquired some old video equipment, including a JVC S-VHS deck with built in TBC, so I decided to put it all to good use. After working my way through many tapes I encountered some moldy tapes that had been stored improperly for years. I was unsure what could be done with them, but after some research I purchased the VHS is Life tape cleaner and all the supplies I would need to clean about 50 tapes. Remarkably, all but 2 tapes were restored to good, playable condition. I currently capture tapes via a component capture card supporting the S-Video output of the S-VHS deck. I am looking into the “VHS Decode” project, which is a direct FM-capture method, leveraging modern computer horsepower to pull usable pictures out of FM encoded tapes.
